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Multifunction printers have been commonplace for many years, and allow you to print, scan, or copy any document with or without your computer, but when it comes to 3D is a little more complicated. First, it’s usually quite harder to design a 3D object than typing some text into a word processor, although 3D objects online database like thingiverse do help. If you want to copy a 3D object, you may have to buy a 3D scanner such as MakerBot Digitizer, and a 3D printer such as Makerbot Replicator 2 which takes space and costs about $3,000 in total. Multifunction 3D printer are slowly coming to market with for example AIO Robotics Zeus which recently shipped to backers, and is now available for $2,500. An other option is Singapore made BlackSmith Genesis, a compact multifunction 3D printer that can print, scan, and copy objects based on a rotary design, that successfully completed a crowdfunding campaign last year, and is now taking pre-orders for $2,200 + $150 shipping max for June 2015 delivery.

BlackSmith Genesis technical specifications:

Printing

Technology – Fused deposition modeling with rotary platform

Build volume – 6648 cm3 (23 cm diameter / 16 cm height)

Layer resolution – 50-200 microns

Filament – PLA 1.75mm diameter

Nozzle diameter – 0.4mm

Print file type – .STL, .OBJ

Scanning

Technology – Laser triangulation

Scan volume – 5542 cm3 (21cm diameter / 16 cm height)

Scan speed – About 6 minutes

Steps per rotation – 1,200 steps

Camera – 3.1MP CMOS Image Sensor

Exported file type – .STL, .OBJ

Interfaces – USB, SD card, and Wi-Fi (WiP)

Power Supply – 100-240W / 50-60Hz / 100W

Dimensions – 35 x 25 x 41 cm

Weight – 11 kg (Indiegogo), but they’ve now reduced the weight to 6kg

The printer-scanner is controlled via a web-based software bundle called Blacksmith Sorcerer. The camera for the scanner can also be used to remotely monitor the printing progress via your smartphone or tablet. The video below demonstrate the main features of the printer.

Following up on my 2013 Crowdfunding Report, I’ve gone through all 55 Kickstarter and Indiegogo crowdunding projects featured on CNX Software between December 2013 and November 2014 (inclusive) to see how well they fared.

The table below sort projects chronologically as they were published on this very blog.

Hall of Shame

Last year, it was clear FocusWill Coolship project was a disaster, and the project owner clearly did not deliver the goods and kept silent. This year, I could not find project that I’m 100% sure failed with money being lost, but at least Plugaway Wi-Fi smart sockets could be a project where backers lost their money. The sockets were supposed to be delivered in March 2014, but nothing so far, and the last update in November is only about the API, nothing about delivery despite backers complains.

AFAICS, nobody lost money with Com1 Android Wear smartwatch, but they should have known better, as Google asked Indiegogo to take the project down, because only Google partners can develop and manufacture Android Wear devices.

Stats and Projects Delays

Out of the 55 campaigns, 15 project failed to reached their funding targets. Most projects without a successful crowdfunding still carried out, with 4 to 6 projects completely dead. That means 72% of projects got funded via crowdfunding, 90% of projects get manufactured (assuming the ones still under development will succeed). AIRTAME got the most funding with over $1,200,000 raised, but has not been so successful in terms of product delivery with 8 months delay.

Many projects are delayed, but Smart Socket Strip may take the delay crown, with a massive 1-year delay for the project, and backers upset of the constant postponing (or lies) about delivery dates. Fin Ring is also pretty bad, as the September 2014 promised delivery is now expected to occur on May 2015.

Hall of Fame

This year several project managed to deliver working products on time, although sometimes shipping was have taken place over a few months.

IteaDuino Lite Arduino clone was delivered right on schedule just a year ago.

MicroDuino JoyPads were delivered on November 2014 as promised

The first version of Console OS Android operating system for PC was released on December 2014.

STACK Box Home Automation / IoT Gateway were sent in December 2014. There aren’t many feedback for now, as most people are still waiting for delivery, or have just received their device.

Many other projects shipped with just one month delay, and still got good user feedback, and an active community around them, such as Micro Python, LOGi boar, VoCore Wi-Fi module, NavSpark. MicroView was also on schedule, and even slightly ahead of schedule, but unfortunately, Sparkfun shipped several boards without bootloaders, and they are still handling the returns.

That’s all for today. If you’ve had good or bad crowd-funding experiences, feel free to share them in the comments section.

About 10 days ago, I wrote about solution to record and play 360 degrees panoramic videos. One of the itmen was vrAse virtual reality case for your smartphone, and allows you to enjoy immersive 3D experience. If you’d rather do your own, than buy a kit for about 100 Euros, there’s an open source project called OpenDive that does about the same thing, and allows you to play games in 3D.

All you need to do is to download the 3D files, print the head-mounted glasses it with your 3D printer, and buy the lense kit (6.99 Euros) to get a complete working system. You may have to modify the design, and adapt it to your phone dimensions. And if you don’t have a 3D printer, somebody provided instructions to do your own by cutting wood or plastic sheets. You then should be able to watch 360 deg. panorama videos, and play 3D games (See current list) as shown in the video below:

If you are a game developer (iOS or Android), you can use the Dive SDK to make your games support the glasses.

More information can be found on Opendive page. There’s also a commercial version called the Dive.

Gustavo Brancante is working on a very interesting project that let you control a prosthetic arm with your muscle movement using open source technology with InMoov Hand (which can be 3D printed), Arduino Uno R3, and Olimex Electrocardiography electromiography shield (SHIELD-EKG-EMG). This is called a Myo-Electric Prosthesis.

Gabriel wrote a tutorial to use his “open arm” which I’ll summarize here.

On the hardware front, you’ll also need a UDP compatible Wifi Shield configured as a UDP server with a fixed IP in the same LAN as the smartphone, and 57600 bps.

TouchOSC (for smartphone and Workstation) is used with the following layout for calibration and feature selection.

Finally load the program below to your Arduino board:

Once everything is connected together, you should be able to do that:

The demo looks impressive, but this is still work in progress, and next step will be to use a four channel EMG instead of the single channel Olimex EMG shield to be able to detect more advanced movements.

PengPod 700 & 1000 are two of the rare Linux tablets to be available on the market. Those tablets are based on AllWinner A10 SoC which can support both Android and Linux thanks to independent developers. After a successful Indiegogo campaign, where they managed to received pledges for a few hundred units of both model, people started to receive their Linux tablets earlier this year. Francesco Santini decided to purchase PengPod 700 in order to use it as an touchscreen controller for his 3D printer (Solidoodle).

He uses a SAMBA share to copy G-code files (“G-code is the common name for the most widely used numerical control (NC) programming language”), and load the required file from the PengPod using the interface above.

He also created the holders to mount the tablet on the printer, as seen in the picture at the top, and uploaded the design files to http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:69593, which can be good if you need a stand for your tablet, whether you have a 3D printer or not.

Beagleboard.org launched the Beaglebone Cape Design Contest back in November, several designs were submitted, and yesterday, they announced the 3 winning CAPEs who will be manufactured and sold by Circuitco Electronics:

It seems to be working, albeit slowly, as a control board for the Makerbot Cupcake.

The replicate hardware files (schematics, bill of materials, gerber files), and the source code (Python and C) for the PRU and controlling stepper motors, are available on Bitbucket. So you could make it yourself, or buy the Replicate from Circuitco when it’s available, and improve the source.

3D Systems was at CES 2013 to showcase their 3D printers, and their online 3D printing ecosystem called Cubify, where you can design your own model, order the object to be 3D printed, which is then shipped to your door.

Charbax shot a video with the company, and I’ve learnt quite a few interesting things about 3D printing:

It’s been around for nearly 30 years, but only used by the industry until recently.

3D printing takes a lot of time. The small spaceship shown in the picture above takes 5 hours to print, a ring about 40 minutes, (designer) shoes take 7 to 10 hours to print in one of the industrial machines.

The body of drones are 3D printed, as well as hearing aid, and they produce 65,000 individually customized invisible aligners for teeth every day.

You can print in more than 3 colors, as 3D systems industrial machines supports up to 390,000 shades of color.

It does not have to be too expensive, as you can print even without a 3D printer, by sending your design to Cubify. The 3D samurai on the picture on the right (about the size of a hand) costs around $60 to print.

The 3D printed guitar (Atom 3D) in the video is also pretty interesting, but it costs between $3000 to $4000 depending on the customization options.

Cubify also have a developers’ page that let people monetize 3D printing when people order prints via 2 options:

AppCreate for modelers – No programming knowledge is necessary, and this piece of software allows designers and modelers to create web apps for 3D printing.

Cubify API for developers – SOAP interface using OAuth. The company also provides a reference PHP implementation that wraps all of the web calls, as well as a sample HTML app. You need to design an app that creates 3D models, then uses the Cubify API to connect to the Cubify.com platform so that 3D printed creations are printed by Cubify Cloud Printing service and shipped out.